I don't much care what you're reading. Put the book down. Scratch its back and tell it you'll be back eventually, but right now there's a story and a voice that have a much better calling on the precious little time you have left. That voice would be Daniel Woodrell's and the story is Winter's Bone.

When Woodrell brings Ree Dolly down from Ozark hollows, she's "brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt eyes ... scarce at the waist but plenty through the arms and shoulders, a body made for loping after needs." Not that you'll ever hear her complain about them, but the girl has needs you can't imagine. Ree is tending a mother who has just plain lost it and sits by the potbelly with that small lingering smile on her face. She has two younger brothers, 8 and 10, who are still learning to shoot squirrels and survive a day in the schoolyard without getting the starch kicked out of them.

And she has a father, Jessup, just about the finest crank cook in the county, who's gone missing. Worse, the horse's ass has jumped bail, which means, with winter in one hell of a mood, Ree is going to lose the house and whatever else goes with it if she can't track the man down.

The thing is, no one up the creek or down it, in the crags and the valleys or hunched over twigs and punk wood in the caves, is thinking there's a future in offering Ree a hand. Not Uncle Teardrop, Jessup's elder brother and one hell of a crank chef himself until that lab went wrong and ate "the left ear off his head and burned a savage melted scar down his neck to the middle of his back." Not the women who guard the all the back doors into Hawkfall. And certainly not Thump Milton, that "monument of Ozark stone" who lords over all the Miltons -- Little Arthur, Spider, Cotton, Whoop and Hog-jaw and Sleepy John -- and puts the fear of God in every one of them.

Fortunately, Ree has that shotgun and that will. Ree can take care of herself. And she has Woodrell as her guide.

Daniel Woodrell

A shot or two of Woodrell at work:

That certain women who did not seem desperate or crazy could be so deeply attracted to Uncle Teardrop confused and frightened Ree. He was a nightmare to look at but he'd torn through a fistful of appealing wives. Victoria had once been number three and was now number five. She was a tall blunt-boned woman made lush in her sections with long auburn hair she usually wore rolled up into a heavy wobbly bun ...

And this:

But there'd been hot buttered parts of those nights she'd liked so and missed. The sweet beginnings that held the promise of who knows what, the scent, the music, the shouted names in a loud place, names you might never get straight. The spark of fun when two men quickened at the sight of her, stepped forward on the same snap and tried to woo her, one in this ear, the other in that. Lust slaking to dance tunes, standing hip bone to hip bone, the new hands moving over her rumples and furls and tender knobs, hands good as tongues in the dark corners of those whiskey moments. Words were the hungered-for need, and the necessary words would be spoken low, sometimes sounding so truly true she could believe them with all her heart until the naked gasp happened and the man started looking for his boots on the floor. That moment always drained her of belief in the words and the man, or any words any man ...

Not me. I still believe in words. And so will you if you abandon whatever fool thing you're reading and spent a mean night or two with Ree Dolly, up there in the Ozarks, wondering what else winter is going to throw at her before everything heads toward melt.